[Assignments] Allow "Assign To" to be Set to "No Students"

[JamesSekcienski]

Problem statement:

Currently the "Assign To" feature requires at least one student to be selected. Thus, to hide content from students, you have to ensure it remains unpublished. Unfortunately, an instructor may accidentally publish content that wasn't meant for student access. They could accidentally hit the publish button on an individual item, click Save & Publish rather than Save when editing an item, and/or select Publish All with the new quick module publishing feature. We currently have course content that we put in an unpublished module that is meant for Instructors/TAs only, but is also fine for Designers to see. This includes support resources for faculty, change history logs, and answer keys. Answers keys are the most important to ensure they remain hidden from students. In addition, some content is added to a course as back-up/alternative assignments, like a make-up exam. As part of our course readiness audits, we check that all assignments have a due date set. However, if an assignment isn't meant to be used, it doesn't necessarily make sense to set a due date since you don't want students to complete it unless it is needed as an alternative assignment. Since some assignments may be unpublished since students shouldn't have access yet, but they should in the future, we can't just look at the published state either to know if due dates have been set for all required assignments.

Proposed solution:

Allow the "Assign To" option to be set to "No Students", empty, or something similar. This way, content can be set to prevent student access even if it is accidentally published. This will be especially helpful as the "Assign To" functionality will soon be applied to Modules and then to other key course content. We have disabled the button to publish all modules at once to avoid the risk of instructors accidentally publishing modules that are labelled to not be published as part of the bulk publishing and then forgetting to unpublish the modules that need to remain hidden. If we could use "Assign To" to not specify any students, then it wouldn't matter if the module was published as part of the bulk publishing. This also helps to keep content like answer keys hidden as well even if they become published.

User role(s):

admin,instructor,ta,designer